


A Slay-Together Family

by Missy



Category: Roseanne
Genre: Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Family, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 09:57:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2846858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Conners are not an ordinary family, in spite of outward appearances.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Slay-Together Family

**Author's Note:**

  * For [escritoireazul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/escritoireazul/gifts).



Darlene still remembers exactly what she was doing when her mom came blazing into the school’s parking lot. She was in the middle of a pick-up basketball game with a bunch of the guys. One minute she’d been laying up for a shot. The next her mother was a few feet away, honking her horn. “DARLENE! GET YOUR ASS IN THE CAR!” Darlene doesn’t remember what sort of excuse she gave her friends – she just remembers jogging over to the car with a quip on her tongue. 

It dies when the door shoots open, admitting her to the car’s interior. Her mother isn’t kidding around. “Come on, it’s an emergency.”

“Yo, Darlene, Mrs. Conner, you gonna be okay?” This is the voice of Justin, one of the boys Darlene palled around with after school – he of the saggy pants, baggy sweatshirt and the majestic bowl haircut, his freckles start as his cheeks redden with anxiety.

“We can take it from here, Vanilla Ice. Gotta go,” Rosanne said, cocking her head toward the road, turning the ignition. “Family stuff.”

Justin backs away from the car, and Roseanne takes advantage of the space, pulling the family Sedan into traffic. They turn toward Becky’s high school.

“Do I get to know what we’re gonna fight this time?” Darlene asks.

“Nah,” Rosanne says. “I thought I’d stay quiet and let it bite you instead.”

“Okay. As long as Becky goes first.”

“Be nice to your sister,” Rosanne said, parking the car. “She’s stuck in that difficult period between being born and dying.”

Becky proved her bromide correct; Rosanne had to page her four times at school before she resentfully tromped out of her after school class.

“Mother, I was in the middle of learning how to cook bagel pizzas - you can be positively medieval.” 

“You’re too kind,” Rosanne drawled. “You still got the can of mace I gave you?”

“I wouldn’t touch it if you paid me.”

“Guess that’s a yes,” she deadpanned. “You’re gonna need it in twenty minutes.” Rosanne floored it to DJ’s elementary school and found the boy already waiting for her, absolutely eager to be sped off to the next event. Then there was nothing left for the children to do but brace themselves for whatever monster lay ahead.

In this case it was an enormous mummy which had broken into Dan’s workplace – he was already on the scene, of course, and hard at work at something more mentally stimulating than fixing cars. Like keeping the mummy in a headlock and was punching it in the face.

The kids automatically fell in line when Rosanne gestured for them to get behind her – she found one gun in the glove compartment and cocked it, shoving a bowie-knife into Darlene’s hands. Darlene glanced at Becky but her sister had already taken DJ into hand and was making sure he had a good grip on his baseball bat before digging around in her backpack, eventually pulling out the mace.

“Woah, dad,” muttered Darlene, shielding her eyes from the sunlight as her father whaled on the mummy as if his family’s lives depended on it. Rosanne cocked the gun. 

“Hi, honey,” he said lightly, pounding a hole in the mummy’s dusty skull.

“Aww, you brought me a present,” she said. 

“Yeah, I knew you wanted a bloodsucking freak for your birthday, so I special-ordered it,” Dan replied. Darlene saw her mother’s smirk; it was what re-assured her that everything would probably be fine. 

She did seem to be having fun watching her husband wrestle a giant mummy to the ground, even though he ended up in a reverse- bearhug before she got her first round off. “C’mon, Rosanne, shoot!”

“I’m trying!” she yelled. “When was the last time you had to kill a bunch of moving rags?”

“When Becky’s last boyfriend turned into a werewolf during dinner!” yelled Dan. “Just shoot!”

Shoot Rosanne did, and her silver bullet – cast, so the children were told, from the melted breastplate of Saint George – did its job. Soon Dan was holding a limp pile of rags, which dissolved into dust before his eyes. He dusted his pants with a grunt. “Bastard ruined my overtime.”

“Yeah, well, it could be worse, your head could be werewolf chow,” Rosanne said. She then came up to kiss him, to the children’s well-practiced but chorused ‘ewws’. 

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she said.

He held out his arms and sarcastically said, “And you brought the kids!”

All three of them couldn’t keep the pretense up a second longer; they rushed up to greet him with hugs, admissions that they’d been scared.

“Forget about it; let’s go out for burgers tonight, my treat.” Suddenly the fear was forgotten, and would stay that way – temporarily.

It would always resurface, but for now Darlene felt a spike of relief. They looked like an ordinary family again.

But for all of their middle-class trappings, the Connors were not your average ordinary family.

*** 

This is how her mother tells the story: a thousand years ago, one of Dan’s ancestors had helped out a man in need. That man, once the dryad had been defeated, revealed himself to be Saint George. Saint George blessed the Conner line, and ever since then the family had been tasked with dispatching nasty beasts the world over.

There were Conners all over the globe, and this family – the Roseanne/Dan branch – was tasked with protecting the whole state of Illinois. 

All of the kids had found out in different ways. Becky had walked in on Dan chainsawing a werewolf’s brain into pieces. DJ was present during a vampire attack at the diner. Darlene had been snooping under her parent’s bed and found a very awesome-looking but very sharp axe. Every time, Roseanne and Dan had feigned surprise, and every time the kids had quietly freaked out about everything going on.

Even with their supernatural trappings, the Conners remain the Conners. They still have to scramble for money, still need to work to make ends meet. It turned into the weirdest blend of normal and bizarre ever. 

But at night, gathered around the TV, Darlene felt a sense of odd camaraderie. She’d worried she was fatally weird in some strange way. But, thanks to her parents’ somewhat-protective influence, Darlene also felt weirdly lucky.

And, she realized, her aim was getting better all the time.


End file.
